Building Yourself Up

Father, we thank you for your word.

Lord, we thank you for your revelation, knowledge and for the people that have tuned in, whether it's now or later on.

Lord, that you're speaking through me, lord, that you use me to touch other people's lives, and, father, we just thank you that it's spirit to spirit, so we open up our supernatural ears and our supernatural eyes to see the things that we need to see tonight out of your word and hear what we need to hear tonight to make the changes in our heart that we need to make to get our future, our present, in line with our future, father.

That what you have for us, father, that we're on the right track, the right, we're meeting the right people at the right place at the right time and everything is in the right moment.

With you, in Jesus' name, we're believing for great things, amen, amen.

So our expectation is on and in the Lord, and only in the Lord, amen.

And so I just wanted to preach a message tonight about building yourself up, building yourself up, and so I just encourage you during this broadcast.

If you need prayer for any reason, if you have any prayer requests, go ahead and, just if you're watching Facebook, you can put them in the comments and we'll catch them, or you can direct message us or feel free to email us at staff at GWCcc, and we'll catch it there as well.

And so we'll be praying towards the end of the broadcast.

My wife, selena, is also here, and so we're going to lift your needs up in prayer.

But I, just before that, we'll just come into the word preaching a message entitled Building Yourself Up, and so we're going to read out of Jude.

The book of Jude is the second to last book in the New Testament, in the whole Bible, and it's written by Jude, of course, right, because it's named after the writer, and so some of these are tricky because you have Paul who wrote a lot of them.

But this is Jude, this is Jesus's half brother, and this is Jude and James were the brothers of Jesus.

And right off the bat we notice in verse one that it says he says dearly loved friends.

Basically, jude, a servant of Jesus Christ.

Right away he calls himself a servant.

And so why in the world, if he was Jesus's brother, why did he not just say hey, I'm Jude, I'm Jesus's brother.

I grew up with him, I knew.

I knew exactly.

No, because why?

Because what happened.

So it says in the Bible in two different places.

I believe it's in John seven and then again in Acts, chapter one.

It hints to the fact that Jesus's brothers did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, and so they, jude, didn't even start believing that Jesus was the Messiah, didn't recognize his ministry until after the resurrection, and so, thank God, he was in the upper room and received the Holy Spirit along with their mother Mary, and so so Jude was saved, did receive this revelation, and so 60 some odd years later, here he is writing this book and it's only one chapter long.

But thank God, you know, maybe you feel like you're late to the party, maybe you feel like you know you're not a first responder, maybe you feel a little behind the times.

Here's Jude.

You know, he, he didn't walk with Jesus as a disciple for the three years that that Jesus was performing miracles and doing the work of the ministry.

Instead, he had grown up with Jesus and so he didn't believe that he was the Messiah.

He, according to John seven and so, but you know what he?

He made a decision, obviously, he witnessed the resurrection and knew who Jesus was, and put that, what happened in the under the blood he, he identified with Jesus his savior and not Jesus his brother, and he put being a family of God ahead of being his natural family.

Amen.

And so we do that each and every day.

Like Jesus said when he walked the earth, these are my mothers and brothers and sisters.

This, this church.

We're married to the church, we're married to the saints, and we walk arm in arm with you, serving God with you, and we're here to encourage you and build you up with the word of God.

But it requires us, according to the book of Jude, it requires, it requires some work on our part.

You know, I was talking to brother Russ here before the service and he was making the comment hey, this Bible's not just gonna open itself up and read itself to you every day.

No, you've got to put in time to disciple yourself and get in the Word and spend some in time with the Lord in prayer every morning and build yourself up by praying in the Holy Ghost.

And so let's talk about that tonight Again.

Jude 1-1, and I'm gonna read it out of the amplified classic he calls himself a bond servant.

I believe in the King James Version, but it says Jude a servant of Jesus Christ, the Messiah and brother of James, writes this letter to those who are called or who are chosen, dearly loved by God the Father, and separated or set apart and kept for Jesus Christ.

I'm telling you what we are set apart to do the work of the ministry.

We're set apart and kept in Jesus Christ for the last days.

I'm telling you we have so much power that's on the inside of us.

You have so much power and so much authority.

If you tap into it, man, you can make every demon in hell, every demonic force run.

And I'm telling you we have so much authority if we would just tap into what God has for us, amen.

And so verse two, reading out of Jude, it says may mercy and soul, peace and love be multiplied to you.

So right away we know that Jude wasn't just about addition, he was about multiplication.

And so he was.

This isn't just some fancy greeting.

He's talking about mercy and peace and God's love, a God.

That word love is God's love, a God-be love being multiplied back to us.

And so when we sow the kind of seeds that he's talking about later on in this chapter in this book, then I'm telling you, god's love, god's peace and the mercy of God is multiplied back to us.

And so then he calls us beloved, beloved.

Verse three my whole concern was to write to you in regard to our common salvation.

So he was just gonna thank God for being saved, he thanked Jesus for what he's done.

And just talk about common salvation.

Things meaning you know.

Common salvation meaning, like you know, the gospel is for everyone, jesus preached it to everyone and Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through Jesus.

So it doesn't matter if you're rich, if you're poor, if you're from America or you're from Africa, it doesn't matter where you're from, it doesn't matter the color of your skin.

Again, it doesn't matter how much money you have.

You must come to the Father through the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ, through the blood of Jesus, and so we enter God's throne, we enter heaven.

Our future is sealed in the blood of Jesus and through the blood of Jesus.

But he says, hey, I find it necessary and I was impelled to write to you urgently and appeal and exhort to you to contend for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints, the faith that is, that sum of Christian belief which was delivered verbally to the holy people of God.

So he wants us to contend earnestly for the faith, the faith that was taught the gospel, what we believe.

It's so important to know what you believe and why you believe it.

And I'm telling you, we're living in the last days, in the last of the last days, and there is deception everywhere you turn in.

You know, every time you turn on the, anything on the internet, anything on your television, there's an agenda to lie to us.

Whether you're watching the news, whatever you're watching is so important.

I just encourage you spiritually.

My wife, selena, just preached this last Sunday night and it was Mother's Day and so our attendance was a little bit down maybe, but she preached on love plus unity equals miracles on unity, and her title was let's Get Along.

And I'm telling you, she preached about a little bit about.

She touched on deception and I'm encouraging you spiritually to feed in this pasture.

In other words, you know you can turn on the internet, you can turn on every YouTube preacher and Instagram preacher that there is out there and you can listen to a whole lot of doctrine that can pull you right out of the plan of God that God has for you.

But I'm telling you, if you're listening to me tonight, if you feel that this is your place, that where you belong spiritually, then you're gonna listen to the doctrine and the word of faith and the word of God coming from this pulpit and you're going to honor that and you're gonna put that first and you're gonna begin to walk, step by step, from faith to faith and glory to glory, growing in the knowledge of God and growing in the revelation of God.

Amen, so we must.

Jude here is encouraging us earnestly, impelling us to contend.

That word, contend for the faith In the Greek, means to strive or to use earnest efforts to obtain it also means to defend and preserve Again.

So there's so much deception out there.

We must defend and preserve our faith, what we believe and why we believe it.

And I'm telling you, we've got a church full of people that defend what they believe and what we believe.

As a church, we've stood arm in arm together against the power of Satan and evil forces and we're defeating those evil forces.

We are in agreement with what Jesus's blood purchased.

And Jesus already won the victory.

And I'm telling you, the victory of what we believe defeats lies.

It defeats liberal agendas and lies that are being spoken through our news media outlets.

And I'm telling you, the truth is prevailing, amen.

And so we are contending for our faith.

And it says in verse four Jude tells us, for certain men have crept in stealthily, gaining entrance secretly by a side door.

Their doom was predicted long ago.

They're ungodly, they're profane, they're persons who pervert the grace or the spiritual blessing in favor of our Lord, and they pervert that into lawlessness and wantonness and immorality and disown and deny our soul, master and Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one.

And so I'm telling you, we contend against those who preach against the word of faith and against the doctrine that we've been handed down.

It talks about in verse three of the.

We contend for the faith which was once and for all handed down to the saints, to the holy people of God.

And so that's us, that is, you and me.

We are saints, we are called ones.

Going back to verse one, we are chosen, we are set apart, we are separated for the gospel, for the love of God and for the use of our master, for our fit and use, for our master's use, use, amen.

And so we are to build ourselves up.

And so, if we skip on down to verse 20,.

You know, from there he goes on and on and talks all about being deceived and warning against false teachers and even against false prophecies.

But in verse 20, it's a call to remain faithful.

And I just wanted to again, I'm preaching on building ourselves up.

And so we find our first point in verse 20.

And it says but you, beloved, build yourselves up.

You're founded on your most holy faith.

This is your most holy faith.

It's my most holy faith.

It belongs to you.

You're making the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You're making what was done at the cross and what was done through the power of God to Jesus by the resurrection of Jesus.

What happened to Jesus happened to you.

You've made it personal.

You've made it personal and you're founded.

You're standing on the rock of Christ Jesus and you're building yourself up.

And it says in the amplified Bible making progress, rising like an edifice, higher and higher and higher.

We're going from faith to faith and glory to glory.

But we're growing in faith.

We're growing.

How are we building ourselves up?

It says by praying in the Holy Ghost.

And so if you find yourself being torn down, feeling down, feeling depressed, maybe you're just missing the steps.

You know you've missed it.

You've stumbled, you keep stumbling over and over again.

I'm telling you right now this it's a real good sign that you're not building yourself up by praying in the Holy Ghost.

That means praying in your supernatural prayer language, and so sometimes, when we pray in English, when we pray in our own understanding, even though we're praying out of our spirit, it's going through your brain.

If you're praying intellectually with you know, and so you can, you can pray with the wrong motives.

You can pray with your own wishes.

You can pray with your own desires.

You can.

You can actually pray something that's not really the will, the perfect will of God.

And so that's why we have our prayer language, our supernatural prayer language by the Holy Spirit.

It allows us to pray out the perfect plan of God, the perfect will of God, and it gets, it sidetracks our emotions, it sidetracks our own intellect and our own thinking and our own desires.

Like I was saying earlier, you know, recently, a few months back, we had one of our members, jack.

He was in the hospital because he had a stroke.

We're gonna pray for him again tonight over a new issue that he's facing, but a couple of weeks, a few weeks ago.

He had had a stroke and he was in the hospital and he temporarily had lost his ability to speak clearly because of the stroke.

But he was encouraged by I believe it was Diane Potter.

Diane Potter reminded him hey, you need to be praying in the Holy Ghost, and he began to pray in his supernatural prayer language.

He began to pray in tongues and he had no issue zero issue praying in tongues.

Why?

Because it bypassed his brain.

It bypassed that area of his brain that was temporarily incapacitated by the stroke and he could just pray fluently in the Holy Ghost and then he began to feel better and then he began to turn around and then his speech returned and so on and so forth, and he was healed and is healed.

We'll talk more about Jack later.

But I'm telling you, you bypass, when you pray in the Holy Spirit, you pray in supernatural, your supernatural prayer language.

I'm telling you, bypassing your squirrely brain and anything, any residue that's left over in there, and you're praying out the perfect will of God, and that's step one to building yourself up.

So we must pray, I believe.

Let's see, let's read it out of the Passion Translation.

And it talks about.

It says but you, my delightfully loved friends, constantly and progressively build yourselves up on your foundation of your most holy faith by praying every moment in the Spirit.

So it says every moment.

I should have underlined that, I missed that, but every moment.

So when we get away from praying in tongues, when we get away from then, the squirrely thoughts can come and fear and anxiety can come.

And I'm telling you again, if you're facing depression, if you're facing where you just feel down and out and low and woe is me and out of it and out of the fight and you've lost the will to fight, I'm telling you it's a sign that you're not praying enough in the Holy Ghost.

And so that's step one to building ourselves up is praying in the Holy Ghost.

And then, if we keep reading the next verse, it says to guard.

Back to the amplified classic.

It says in verse 21,.

To guard and to keep yourselves in the love of God.

Expect and patiently wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, which will bring you into unto life eternal amen.

And so it brings us into eternal life.

So we're to guard and keep ourselves in the love of God.

So number two to building ourselves up is to fasten your heart to the love of God.

And I'm telling you, when you step away, any step out of love is a step out of the faith of God, it's a step out of the plan of God.

And so it's very important it comes first in our relationships, it comes first in our marriages, it comes first in our relationships with our kids is to operate and shift our focus, shift our thinking and our way of thinking to our spirit, which the love of God has been shed abroad in our spirits.

And so the love of God starts in our spirit.

It starts that's where the love of God is generated from.

And so when you're thinking thoughts against people, if you're thinking thoughts against unity as an example, just a practical example if you're going through lots of strife with your spouse, with your husband or with your wife, the first area to check again, number one, are you praying in the Holy Spirit?

And number two are you walking in God's love, the agape love, god's kind of love?

Are you really following 1 Corinthians 13 in your love walk?

It's a good thing to check.

Where are you at in your love walk?

And so we must fasten our hearts.

That's where I got.

That is out of the passion translation.

It says 21, to fasten your hearts to the love of God and receive the mercy of God.

So that's number three.

How do we build ourselves up?

We must receive the mercy of the Lord as well.

And so it talks about that again in verse 21,.

To receive the mercy of our Lord, jesus Christ, who gives us eternal life.

And it says keep being compassionate to those who still have doubts, doubts about their faith.

In other words, man, those that are kind of on the fence.

They don't really know what to think about you.

They don't really know what to think about what you believe, man, maybe at work, maybe at lunch, maybe around the lunch table, wherever, maybe you're out to lunch and it's a business lunch, and you begin to express what you believe about something.

Maybe it's a current event, maybe whether it be abortion or something else, and they just, man, they don't know what to think about the way you present the truth.

I'm telling you, we're to have compassion and patience with those type of people, with those people that are just on the fence.

They just they really don't know what they believe and why they believe it, and we're able to have influence.

But we must first receive the mercy of God.

And then number four we're to walk with the same compassion that Jesus did, but first let's, in verse 22, refute so that as to convict some who dispute with you, and on some have mercy, who waiver and doubt.

And so we're to have mercy.

We have to receive mercy for ourselves before we can have mercy on other people.

And so, in other words, and when you're building yourself up, you've already forgiven yourself for the mistakes that you've made.

In order for me to minister to other people on the forgiveness of Jesus, I must have received the forgiveness of Jesus in my own life.

In order for me to use not just the love of God but to explain the revelation of what the blood of Jesus has done for somebody, man, I've gotta receive that revelation for me that Hebrews talks about.

I must have faith in the blood of Jesus as well.

I must know that every mistake that I've ever made is under the blood and I must forgive myself for every mistake that I've made.

And so, in order for you to build yourself up, you know we don't have time to be weak worms of the dust.

You know it's, it's, it's.

We have no time to be weak Christians.

We must be strong in what we believe and why we believe it.

We must be strong in order to face the opposition that we're facing.

Yes, jesus has already given us the victory, but we must walk in that victory by building ourselves up.

And so, number three, I'm talking about receiving the mercy of the Lord Jesus.

And then, to those around us, we must walk in mercy, the ones that dispute with us.

We, we can't, just we must, you know, sprinkle and not just use a fire hose and knock them down and knock them over.

I just I was thinking back today about the time that my dad, our pastor, back in 2018, he had open heart surgery and so he spent several days in the hospital getting over that.

And I just remember, you know, medically, he had some beliefs that that certain nurses or certain doctors didn't believe in.

And then, spiritually speaking, you know they knew that he was a pastor and you know when he would pray in tongues and other things, when he was praying.

You know some of those nurses they didn't believe what he believed, but I'm telling you, he had mercy.

He showed compassion, the compassion of Jesus, and he had mercy on those, and I just remember him being such a light to the nurses when he was under their care.

And so we must walk in that same mercy.

Number four we must walk in the same compassion that Jesus did.

And so that's really my last point tonight is in verse 23,.

It says strive to save others, snatching them out of the fire.

On others, take pity, but with fear, loathing even the garment spotted by the flesh and polluted by their sensuality.

In other words, let's read that in the passion translation.

I'm talking about verse 23.

Well, let's just do 22 and 23, why not?

It says keep on being compassionate to those who still have doubts and snatch others out of the fire to save them.

In other words, some people are wrong, and you know, because of ignorance, and other people are willfully ignorant, they're willfully walking in ignorance and away from the gospel.

And to some of those, we must snatch those out of the fire and save them and be merciful over and over to them, but always couple your mercy with the fear of God.

In other words, be extremely careful, it says, to keep yourselves free from the pollutions of the flesh, you know.

So, in other words, we're to hate sin, but we're to love the sinners, and we say that all the time, and we're having compassion.

So others save with fear and others.

You snatch them out of the fire.

So those second group of people are confronted more strongly, right, so we need to pull them out of the fire, but never in a prideful way.

It's never in an arrogant way.

Hey, I know more than you know.

Hey, this Jesus guy, I'm best friends with him and I just I know him so much more than you and you need to get on my same.

You know, it's not in an arrogant or a pushy way.

It's done through the love of God.

You're sharing the truth, but it's done through the love of God in a non-arrogant way.

And I'm telling you, you can stand firmly in your position of truth.

Jesus is the truth, the truth, the way and the life, and you can stand on him and stand on that truth and still not bow to the pressures, any peer pressure or pressure to go along with whatever the lie is, that's being, that's going around your office or your sphere of influence, maybe it's a belief that's happening in your group of friends.

And I'm telling you always stand up for the truth, but you're doing it through compassion, through love, and not through arrogance, amen.

And so I'm telling you it's a spiritual warfare and I want to read the last two verses of Jude, because you think about all of the false doctrines that are being perpetrated and spoken about, preached about, and all the different things that Jude has talked about in this one chapter.

It's very powerful, but it's a very prophetic warning of the last days and so we've talked about again.

We're talking about building ourselves up, but he turns it at the end from being a warning and he turns it towards the power of God amen.

In verse 24, it says Now to the one with enough power to prevent you from stumbling into sin and bring you faultless before his glorious presence.

I'm telling you, you're not what your mama made you.

You're not what your past has made you.

You're not what your mistakes have made you.

You are walking in the full power of God that is able to stop you from stumbling.

You have been redeemed.

You have been.

I'm telling you, we plead the blood of Jesus over you and over your past and over your life, and you are free of guilt, you are free of shame and you walk fearlessly in the presence of God.

And this power is able to.

This glorious presence allows you to stand before him with ecstatic delight.

It says To the only God, our Savior, through our Lord, jesus Christ, be endless glory and majesty, great power and authority, from before he created time and now and throughout all the ages of eternity.

Amen.

I'm telling you.

So it goes before he created time and all the way through eternity.

You know, eternity is both ways, it's forwards and backwards.

And I'm telling you, we get to serve God together in the power that he's provided us, in the authority that he's provided us for eternity.

Arm and arm together for eternity, because we believe the Bible, we believe the word of God, we have the word of God in our mouths and we speak only the word.

I'm telling you we might be surrounded by all kind of doubt and fear and lies and destruction and all kind of schemes of the devil, but we stand firm on the word of God and we are strong in the Lord and the power of his might, amen.

And we put on the whole armor of God and we fight against every strategy of the devil.

I'm telling you, we can know ahead of time what the devil has planned and we hold on to the God of truth and the God of peace and the God of mercy and we know we can snatch people out of the fire because we were snatched out of the fire.

Amen, I'm telling you, we know what the devil has, you know, in trying to plan what he thinks he has in store for us.

But no, we're holding on to the power of God and living in that power and we're exempt from the plan of the enemy because of the power of God, because we built ourselves up, not because we're in bed with the sheets pulled over our face, you know, in anxiety and fear and depression.

No, we have built ourselves up, we have prayed in tongues, we know who we are in Christ, we walk with love and compassion and we've fastened our hearts to the love of God, amen, and to the mercy of God.

And so I hope this message bless you tonight.

We need to build ourselves up on our most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, amen.

So I hope this brought some revelation, knowledge to your life tonight to lift you up and encourage you.

Amen.